


the only heaven i'll be sent to is when i'm alone with you

by kaielle



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Biblical Prose, Fluff, M/M, Not Fluff, artsy zombie messiahs, it's kinda gross really, my paint kink is outrageous dear lord, simon is too in love, sue me, this is such a weird range of emotion what have i done, zombies in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 20:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2122791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaielle/pseuds/kaielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People once razed towering cities to their unhallowed ground for a God that never bestowed them with so much as a glimpse of himself, and yet Simon Monroe has an Anointed One of his own stowed away in a house across town, tangible and cold and bright as the rays of sunlight that stream through cathedral glass in a kaleidoscope of color, and all he ever did for him was loiter in a graveyard and drop the knife he himself had brought into the fray.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the only heaven i'll be sent to is when i'm alone with you

**Author's Note:**

> title from "take me to church" by hozier. that man is my lyrical soul mate i can feel it.

Kieren Walker doesn't have much faith left for Messiahs, but Simon Monroe doesn't see a reason to push it on him, not when he has enough faith for the both of them twelve times over.

 

//

 

Sometimes late at night, when Kieren's on the other side on Roarton, spilled across his bed, portraits of the dead hanging limp from his pale, sleeping fingers, and Simon's lying on top of his own bed, staring vividly awake up at the ceiling, his boots crossed atop the comforter, he thinks about this.  He thinks about the masses upon masses of starving faithful who have pressed themselves into fading pews, who have crawled miles on sharp bloody knees, who have hung grave markers on their walls and asked for absolution from something they've never seen, never touched, and he thinks that all these people signed their souls away for far less than what he's been given.  They never heard God's words spoken like honey spiked with lightning poured through their ears, or were allowed to have their fingertips whisper reverences across His skin, or dropped to their knees at the gilded sight of Him, His entire silhouette washed in the blinding light of a thousand aureoles.  Unlike how he is blessed with Kieren's voice, the perfect psalm of it, the lilt in his questions and the whirlpool in his chest that writes itself into every word.  Unlike how he gets to stroke his fingertips down Kieren's scars under the dinner table and trace the outlines of his long, talented fingers when it's midnight and they're watching a film on the couch, the darkness their only voyeur; unlike how he gets to press the prayers creased in his lips into every inch of Kieren's cool skin, the sheets of Kieren's twin-sized bed always crisp beneath them  - they're lifeless bodies never warm them up; unlike how he gets to fit his dirty fingers against the marble edges of Kieren's ribs when they walk together, when they sit next to one another, when they fall sleep on the floor of Amy's room, Kieren's soft caramel hair tucked beneath the sharp jut of his chin.  Unlike how most mornings he wakes with the image of his beautiful boy embossed behind his eyelids; unlike how when he finally gets around to opening his dim, deceased eyes, Kieren is the first thing he sees, head resting on his pale arm, his other limbs tucked up around him; unlike how he spends every waking moment these days looking at him, taking in the faded shades of him from the wisps of his caramel hair to the electric burst of his eyes to the mottled palette of his marble skin, unwilling to spend his share of eternity on anything…less.  People once razed towering cities to their unhallowed ground for a God that never bestowed them with so much as a glimpse of himself, and yet Simon Monroe has an Anointed One of his own stowed away in a house across town, tangible and cold and bright as the rays of sunlight that stream through cathedral glass in a kaleidoscope of color, and all he ever did for him was loiter in a graveyard and drop the knife he himself had brought into the fray.

 

//

 

Sometimes Kieren will be sitting on the couch in the Walker's house with him, Jem at school, Sue working with some committee or another, and Steve gone off to wherever he goes, his knee pressed under Simon's, and he gets this surreptitious way about him.  Simon always bites down on the smile that presses into the corners of his mouth, tugging the skin of the inside of his bottom lip between his teeth to keep the grin at bay.  He thinks Kieren is aware that he knows what he's up to, but he never says anything - doesn't want to ruin it.  He just keeps his eye on the television, his lip caught between his teeth, and watches out of the corner of his eye as Kieren flips open his sketchbook, pulls a pencil silently out from the pocket of his jumper, and sets to work, his eyes flicking up clandestinely to map out the cartography of Simon.  They'll sit there for entire days at a time, Kieren with his legs pulled up beneath him, sketching verses into his personal bible, Simon never bringing up the fact that they both know they aren't marathoning television all day.

Once Kieren asks to paint him.

"Me?" he asks, his eyebrows hitching up, his arm still hung around Kieren's shoulders where his fingers had been tracing idle patterns amongst the freckles there, connecting them aimlessly into constellations.

Kieren just nods, the corners up his mouth quirked up.

"I'm tired of only ever having sketches of people," he says then, and Simon feels his organs pitfall at the mournful twist of Kieren's mouth, if only in the sense that one can _feel_ a phantom limb.  "I need more things in color - more things drawn up in life."

Simon's eyes flick downwards to his socked feet sitting in the oasis of wood floor, his mind drifting out and catching on the sketch of Amy that Kieren had placed atop her coffin, the black lines of it curled against the sea of negative space.

"Okay," he murmurs, his gaze sliding back to Kieren as it always inevitably does, like a magnet drawn to metal.  A quiet smile blooms across Kieren's mouth and something twists in Simon's dead chest at the beautiful gift of it, and the feel of it when Kieren presses it to the corner of his mouth, his chilled lips drawing imagined warmth into Simon's colorless skin.

…

"Let me see it!"

"No, it's not done," Kieren laughs, his eyes crinkling in the corners from the giddiness of it.  He rotates the canvas slightly in on himself, making sure Simon can't sneak a look and casts suddenly narrowed eyes on him.  He flings his paintbrush out at Simon, pointing him down.  Simon stares at the hurricane of vibrant colors on the bristles and finds his curiosity piqued. "Don't you dare look."

Simon raises his hands up in a placating way and watches with a warm smile as Kieren takes his acquiescence and wipes his hand across his forehead to brush his hair out of his vision, leaving a multicolored streak of blue, green, and purple along the strip of pale skin above his brows.  He wriggles his nose and Simon feels a huff of laughter escape through his nose.

"What?" Kieren asks, his brows drawing together.  Simon just shakes his head and turns his fond expression to his lap, fiddling with his fingers.

"Nothing.  Go back to painting."

Kieren just stares at him for a long moment, suspicious, before shaking it off and disappearing back behind his canvas. "Nutter."

…

"Kieren, I've been sitting here for three hours."

"You've been _redeemed_ and _blessed with eternal life_ and all that rubbish - I think you can spare a few hours for your undead boyfriend," Kieren says, poking his head out from behind the canvas.  His hair is mussed at his hairline, wisps of it sticking up this way and that, a few stray streaks of blue and purple acrylic brushed across the caramel of it.

Simon levels him with a despairing gaze, sighing.  Kieren rolls his eyes at him.  He goes back to painting and Simon groans, flopping back against the floor.

"Oh no, no, you volunteered," Kieren admonishes him.  "Up you get, come on."

Simon pushes himself back up, leaning on the floor on his elbows and peering up at his stubborn, determined perfectionist.  All at once he makes up his mind and sits up, waiting for Kieren to disappear again before he silently stands up and pads soundlessly over to the canvas on his bare feet.  By the time Kieren notices the shadow hanging over him, Simon's already behind the painting, staring at the colorful whirlwind of brush strokes that make up Simon through Kieren's eyes.

Kieren lets out a squawk, pushing at Simon with a hand on his stomach.

"Simon," he groans, trying pathetically to block Simon's view of the piece with his other hand, moving it around here and there.  It doesn't have the desired effect.

Simon grasps Kieren's hand off his stomach and slips his fingers through Kieren's before stepping up to his back from where he was sitting at the easel on a worn down, paint-covered stool and wrapping their combined arms around Kieren's front, placing their laced hands at the jut of his waist, just above his hipbone.  He ducks his head to press a kiss to the top of Kieren's soft hair, keeping his eyes on his bright doppelganger the entire time.

"I just can't get over you, Kieren Walker," he says softly, voice reverent with awe, eyes flicking over every inch of the painting, the blunt streaks of bright acrylic that made up the soft planes of his face.  "You just keep amazing me."

Kieren scoffs, but it's soft - it lacks heat or sarcasm.  "Big, bad disciple and you're just a big sap." 

Simon cocks an eyebrow at him behind his back and in one quick move steals the paintbrush out of Kieren's long fingers and runs a streak of blue-green down the long line of his throat, curving around his ear.  The paint matts in the edges of his hair, slicking the baby-fine edges at his nape down to the delicate skin of his neck.

Kieren lets out an indignant squawk before stumbling off the stool and away from Simon, nearly crashing into the still wet painting.  As it is, the jut of his elbow hits the corner of the canvas as he turns his indignation on Simon.  He lets out another sound as he draws his elbow up, tugging at the fabric to find a swatch of green acrylic across the wool stitching.

Simon can't control his laughter at the kicked puppy look on Kieren's face, and when he's doubled over, Kieren seizes his opportunity.  He scoops his palette up from the floor, digs his fingers in it unceremoniously, and runs them through Simon's hair.

All at once Simon goes very still.  Then he gets this hard glint to his eye, and Kieren feels a very real fear thrum quietly through his frozen blood.  He edges out away from the painting and Simon, clutching the palette in his hands.

"And there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven from the throne," Simon began, and Kieren recognized his tone from the ULA sermons he used to give in Amy's living room, "saying, 'It is done'. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great."

He has Kieren's paintbrush poised like a weapon in his hand, and then suddenly he's on him, plowing them both to the floor and trapping Kieran's wrists above his head with a hand while his other desecrates his angelic face with deep purple strokes from the side of the brush, catching him under the eye so that when Kieren's eyes flutter back open, his eyelashes are violet on one side.  Paint soon stripes his favorite burgundy sweater (which is really Simon's loss, considering it's his, but it's worth the gleeful exasperation scrunching up Kieren's features) and thinly covers the entire expanse of his neck with the bare remainders of paint.  Kieren starts yelping when he sets to work on the underside of his jaw, the sensory memory of his ticklish spots taking over.

When he can't take it anymore, Kieren cages Simon's hips with his knees and rolls the two of them over, yanking his hands free of Simon's grasp.  He immediately swipes his entire palm across his palette and smears his hand all across Simon's face, twisting it from his temple down his nose to the opposite cheek before sweeping the ends of his fingers down the opposite side of his jaw and pulling his hand off, staring down with a glorious grin at the look of shock that's taken over Simon's features.

"You've got a little.." Kieren says, trailing off, gesturing with a hand at the entirety of his face.  Simon's face turns playfully indignant, and then he's raising up onto his elbows, unsettling Kieran to his lap, his back resting against the tops of Simon's propped up thighs, and lifting a hand to poke his finger into the dip of Kieren's cheek.  He swipes it down and when he pulls it back, the pad of his finger it coated in a pretty indigo color.

"So do you," he muses, huffing out a laugh, and Kieran takes him in, the glorious explosion of color he is in the moment, and the easiest smile he's ever had unfolds across his face, warm and bright and natural as the color of his hair or the cut of his teeth or the movement of his limbs.

The breath he doesn't breathe gets stuck in Simon's throat and he can't help himself.  His hand curls itself around the curve of Kieren's neck, pulling him down, and he kisses him, languid like liquid sunlight, and if this isn't holy, this sweetness between them that baptizes the retched marrow in his bones every time he lets himself have it, then there's nothing on this Earth that is, not the Prophet, not the Rising, not the hallowed ground of Roarton's chapel nor the sacred earth of the cemetery.  Nothing.

He pulls back, knocking his nose up against Kieren's, his hand sliding down to the base of his throat so his thumb can swipe reverently across the dip where his throat becomes his sternum.

Kieren laughs at him, and he smiles dumbly back at him.

"What?" he asks, tapping his thumb against his throat, the vibrations of Kieren's laugh reverberating through the bones of his finger.  Kieren bites his bottom lip, sneaking another glance at him before huffing another bout of laughter again.

"You've got paint on your mouth."

 

//

 

Summer rolls around and Kieren takes to disappearing with the sun.  It should worry Simon, and it does, but not enough, and not in the way it once might of.  There aren't skeletons in their closet, but there's a bloodstain on the Walker's garage door and a rotting body in the graveyard that's having its second go, and he knows enough to leave Kieren to himself, except for when he comes home to Amy's in the earliest hours of the morning smelling like deep earth and the smoky mesquite aroma of fire and wraps his chilled body around Simon's, tucking his head beneath Simon's chin, never uttering a word.  Simon just strokes his hair until his breathing stops, and he knows Kieren's asleep.  When he wakes up in the morning, Kieren's gone, but there's charcoal smudged along the curves of his collar bones where Kieren's hand had rested.

Jem comes over whiles Kieren's gone that morning, pushing her way past him through the front door and heading straight to the living room.  There'd been something in her hands, but she'd moved past him too quickly for him to get a good look.

"I thought Abrasive Siblings Day wasn't until Thursday," he drawls, propping himself against the doorway to the living room.  Something stiffens in him when she drops herself down into the chair, the chair where he'd sat weeks ago and preached the words of a malignant prophet to the malleable minds of his own kind, where he'd turned them all into arrows now notched in the direction of his and Kieren's throats.  It hurts him to think of the Prophet now, to think of the reverence and the faith he'd had only weeks ago that has left him void.  It was everything he'd ever known in this second life, and now he finds himself watching it crumble, for how could he follow someone who says they're holy, when they try to erase the single holiest thing in existence?  How could he align his faith with a religion that sought to tear down the bright and the lovely for the sake of the dark and the lost - who would kill their own Messiah for a chance to play God?

Simon blinks away the thoughts, black and cancerous as they are.

Jem levels him with a look, setting a white box against her thighs, looking tired and thoroughly done with him and his stubborn behaviors.

"Sit," she says, and he does, crossing the room to perch on the edge of the couch next to her, leaning forward so his elbows dig into his knees and his hands are clasped in the space in front of them, fingers woven together.

"I don't know how much Kier's told you about…before, or how much Amy thought was proper for you to know, but…" she trails off, trying to find the words.  Her hand comes up to fiddle with the end of her tie, still dressed up in uniform, like she'd dropped by her house right after school and come straight here.  "Well, this time of year's always going to be hard for him, what with all the people that by all intents and purposes should still be around to live through it with him, but aren't.  So, against my better judgment and keeping in mind the fact I'm probably about to be excommunicated by my brother, I brought you some stuff I thought you should probably see, to, uh…keep him together.  Because he needs that."

 She awkwardly hands him the box off her lap, eyeing him warily like she knows this is the worst decision she's ever made and is considering taking it back every second.  He takes the box from her gently and sets it beside his thigh on the couch.  Silence builds up like quicksand around them and Simon clears his throat against a fist in an attempt to relieve some of the suffocating tension.

"Thanks," he says, and she looks at him like his words physically pain her.

"Yeah, um, don't mention it." She gets a wide eyes look on her face and says hurriedly, "Seriously, don't."

"Cross my heart," he says with a wry smile, and she huffs a laugh at him, the corner of her mouth ticking up.  She flicks her long ponytail over her shoulder and stands up, making her way to the front door, she stops in the doorway to the living room, however, and turns around to look at him one last time.

"Just…take care of him, alright?  Mum and Dad and me, we…well, sometimes we don't do the best job.  We say the wrong thing and it comes out all prejudiced or we try to look out for him but we get it all wrong.  He's happy here, though.  You make him happy."

And before he can say anything to her she's opened the door and escaped back out into the yard.

Simon sighs and runs a hand through his hair before flicking his eyes to the box.  He feels like Pandora, torn between opening it and leaving it here for Kieren, knowing from Jem's words that it contains private things not meant for his eyes.  Jem's words about Kieren needing help staying together eventually sway him, though, and he picks up the box, settles it back on his lap, and lifts the top off, dropping it somewhere off to his left on the couch.

The box is an amalgam of memories.  There're photographs, and drawings Simon easily recognizes as having come from Kieren's own hand, along with printed newspaper articles, little sheets of stray paper with scribbles scrawled across them, and little mementos, like candle stubs and concert tickets, with the occasional odd ball, like an empty container of chapstick, the bottom half a children's book, and a little plastic cylinder with a hospital label pressed across it and small pieces of metal rattling about inside.  He peers at the latter for a moment, reading **Macy, Rick** typed across it in neat print, his stomach tightening.  He sets it back in the box and takes in the purple note on the top of the stock.  He sees Jem's name signed at the bottom and he picks it up, scanning over it.

_Kieren's Radical Occult Boyfriend,_

_This is Kieren's secret memory box.  I've known he's had it since I caught him filing away love notes in it back in eighth grade, but we both pretend I have no idea of its existence, so.  Inside are a bunch of his things, things that detail the last year of his life, and probably, knowing the sap, his recent time with you.  And Amy, too, probably.  I tossed in some articles just to clear some things up, but that's about it.  He's probably going to hate me, but he'd never tell you the detailed stuff about Rick until you pieced it together yourself, and you need to know.  For him._

_Jem_

He sets the note aside gingerly and begins picking up and examining items in the box.  He doesn't think he'll ever understand the chapstick or the book that's been torn in half, but there are things he is able to piece together, like the morgue tags that Kieren's tied together.

 

NAME OF DECEASED: Macy, Rick.  AGE: 18.  SEX: Male.  RACE: Caucasian.  WEIGHT: 94 kg.  HEIGHT: 6'.  CAUSE OF DEATH: Cranial shrapnel.

 

NAME OF DECEASED: Walker, Kieren.  AGE: 18.  SEX: Male.  RACE: Caucasian.  WEIGHT: 75 kg.  HEIGHT: 5' 11" .  CAUSE OF DEATH: self-mutilation.

 

There're a few birthday candles rolling around on the bottom, chocolate icing pressed into the divots in the wax along the bottoms.  There's a big 1 and a big 6 taking up space on the bottom of the box, and when he lifts up the six, Simon's surprised to find black lettering along the white part of the wax.  _16th birthday - crisps and cake in the cave with Rick._ He places it back on the bottom and then rifled through a few sheets of paper, his fingers tracing over the slim scratchy print of Kieran's handwriting dictating Whitman and Neruda, with a few snippets of poetry he doesn't recognize at all.  There're drawings, too, loads of them - little sketches of a boy prettily outlined in shadows, of the same boy driving a car, a carefree smile hanging low on his face, of Jem when she was younger (but undeniably Jem), of a pair of feet standing on their tiptoes, and like Jem predicted, a few sketches of Amy.  Most of them are beautiful and careless and perfectly Amy, polkadots, petticoats, tulle, and all, but one is frighteningly dark, a hasty sketch of Amy in scratchy lines, her bloody face leaning over a shapeless form that Simon is sure is a body, rabidity sketched deep into the lines of her face.  Simon doesn't even pick that one up, just carries on past it.  There's a half used book of stamps with _I must've written him a thousand letters but there seems to be no magic number to get him to talk to me_ written across the shiny backing of used stamps.  Whoever Rick was in life, Simon thinks darkly, he was an idiot.

Simon abandons the rest of the box in favor of the photos and the articles.  His eyes scan over the first article, reading about the tragic death of Rick Macy and the hole that'd been punched through the heart of Roarton in his wake.  The next article talks about the rising of the HVF and Simon nearly balls it up in disgust.  He keeps control of himself, though, and reads about the heroic rising of Bill Macy and Vicar Oddie.  He pushes himself through detailed descriptions of the 'heroic takedown' of seven 'rotters' and can't bring himself to finish what little remains of the article.  He turns to the third and the title pierces through him like a weapon through the chest.  "LOCAL TREGEDY PUTS TO REST RESURRECTED WAR HERO AND TEARS APART BELOVED FAMILY".  He already knows this part of the story.  He knows it from the sad set of Kieren's face at the party, from the big mouth of the late Henry Lonsdale at one of the bungalow sermons, from the stain on Kieren's garage door that carries on to the driveway, from the twisted downturn of Amy's mouth.  He knows how it ends.  He sets the articles back in the box.

All that remains are the photos.  Simon flips through them, smiling at the gangly, wide-eyed thing Kieren had been in his early adolescence.  Some are with Jem, but most are with the boy from the drawings, and Simon knows by now that they're of Rick.  He knew from the beginning - who else could they be?  He gets through the entire stack before he flips them over to look at the dates scribbled across them and finds an ink sketch of Rick pressing a harsh kiss to the surprised mouth of one Kieren Walker in the shadows of a dark place.  The cave, he decides, thinking of the note along the candle.  It stirs something in him to look at it.  Not jealousy, not quite, but sadness.  Sadness that Kieren was obviously so in love with this boy and he was ripped away from him so violently.  Simon puts the photos back in the back along with the things he'd tossed aside before putting the lid back on it.  He holds it, the delicate weight of it, in his hands for a moment, the ticking of some clock in the house knocking around in his head, before he stands up and strides to Amy's bedroom, ducking his head to look at the floor to avoid the dresses, paintings, perfumes, and stuffed animals littering the room.  He gets down on his hands and knees on the shag carpet in the middle of the floor, pushing the box gently underneath her bed.  Then he just falls all the way down to the floor, hitching his knees up to his chest and resting his arms across them, staring blankly off into the distance of Amy's silent room.

Poor, poor Kieren Walker.

…

He's half asleep in his bed that night when he hears socked feet shuffling tiredly against the carpet.  The bed dips and suddenly there's a cool weight pressed up against his back and an arm slung around his waist, a cold nose nudging the back of his cold neck.

"I've got something to show you," he whispers in the dark, his voice just below Simon's ear.  Simon nods and Kieren tightens his arm, his hand pressed to the bare skin where Simon's shirt has rucked up.

"Tomorrow?" Simon asks, and he feels Kieren's exhalation against his neck, not in its feeling, but in its pressure.  It's more than breath, he knows.  It's a release of unnamed emotions and tension and the rotten feeling deep inside that has nothing to do with his condition.

"Tomorrow," Kieran agrees, and the two of them drift off into a limbo between sleep and wakefulness, where they can still hear the ticking of the clock, but they're lost to everything else, excluding each other.

…

The next day comes and Simon's happily surprised to find Kieren still asleep when he opens his eyes, hugged close to his chest when he must've turned around in the night.  He leans back just a little and gives himself a few selfish moments to just take him in, the soft edges of his nose and the cut of his cheekbones, and Simon wishes, not for the first time, that he was the one who could paint, to note the shadows his ashen lashes cast across his bare marble skin, the soft curve of his eyebrows, the sleep tousled muss of his hair.  He's not one to constantly slather people in compliments, but he doesn't think he could ever tell Kieren how simply and truly beautiful he is and be able to stop himself.  It gets to him sometimes - in certain lights, or when Kieren makes certain faces, more and more frequently when he just acts a certain way - Simon will get this pinched feeling in his throat and neck that has nothing to do with his dead nerves and physiology.  It's from the want to express everything to this pale, golden boy, but having within him a dam built up to halt the flow, to catch his words so he doesn't damn himself further.  _You're supposed to follow Messiahs, Monroe,_ he reprimands himself, even though there's no feeling behind it, no anchor in Simon's chest, _not fall in love with them_.  He thinks that's what the Prophet would tell him, and what the other disciples would say if he ever runs into them again, which he's sure he will.  They'd all see that as the problem - that he'd buried his faith beneath the ribs of a sacrificial lamb with golden fleece.  None of them would see the gleam of him, feel the divinity beneath his skin, hear the steadfast love in his every word.  He'd never understand how they could see the death of something so lovely as more beneficial than his life.  Why kill the lamb for prosperity when its golden fleece will bring it anyways?  Simon reminds himself as he reaches out to lightly brush his fingers across Kieren's caramel hair in the ghost of a touch that that's why he's around, to make sure Kieren stays golden, that the others with their blind eyes and their mistaken hands don't extinguish him for their own salvation.

Kieren's eyes flutter open, white and opalescent, free of contacts. 

"Hi," he whispers, smiling softly.  Simon smiles back, not stopping in running his fingers over his hair.

"Hi."

"We're a soppy pair, aren't we?" he asks, scrunching up his nose.  Simon laughs softly.

"'S'pose we are, yeah," he agrees, stopping his ministrations to run his thumb over the outskirts of Kieren's eyelashes, something in his chest pitching when they flutter beneath his touch.  He finds himself leaning in, then, hesitating just a breath away from Kieren's mouth, eyes roving over the smooth expanse of marbled skin, the bruised color of his mouth, the unique expanse of his eyes.  He hears Kieren's breath hitch and he closes the gap, pressing his mouth soft and loving against Kieren's, the push and pull initiating between them, their poles drawn together in the way of forces of nature.

Simon breaks their lips to press Hail Marys up the column of his throat, to mouth Our Fathers against the underside of his jaw, to ask for absolution by way of open mouthed kisses across the small expanse of skin behind his ear that curls into the nape of his neck.  His hand comes up to delve into his tousled hair, the other slipping down his side to grip at his waist, his lips brushing across his cheeks back to his lips.

Kieren is chilled beneath him and Simon, for the life and death of him, can't find any fault with it.

Kieren pulls away after a moment, the action seeming to pain him, and Simon grins cockily at him as Kieren rests his forehead against his own.

"That's one way to wake up," he mumbles, and Simon laughs big and loud, leaning back against his pillow, the hand at his waist tugging Kieren with him.

…

Simon pulls Kieren out of bed with him sometime around noon and the two of them get dressed, ignoring the calendar every time they walk past it.  They both know what day it is, they don't need a sheet of paper to serve up a brutal reminder.

Simon pokes his head in their room as Kieren's changing, his long arms tugging a sweater over his chest.  Simon can't remember if it's his or not.

"Kier?" he asks.  Kieren turns around and looks at him with his wide, round eyes.  Simon is still surprised but happy to find them free of contacts.  "Wear something…fun."

Kieren catches his hesitation and smiles wryly at him.

"I think you were gonna say fabulous," he says, his mouth slowly spreading into a full blown grin.  Simon stares at him blankly.  He blinks.

"Mmmm," he hums, shaking his head mock-thoughtfully.  "No.  No, I don't believe I was."

"Idiot," Kieren mutters, shaking his head fondly.  Simon smiles before leaving him to it, checking his wallet for cash before shoving it back into his back pocket.  He rummages through the bungalow closet for the tie Amy'd given him as a 'beginning of our journey friendship gift' when they'd left the ULA commune for Roarton.  He finds it hanging off a hanger, sharing it with a suit coat.  He tugs the thing around his throat, tying it loosely beneath the collar of his button down.  He fiddles with it, placing it this way and that across his abdomen, the bright floral pattern of it never seeming to sit right on his body.  He gives up and leaves it crooked when Kieren walks into the room with one of Amy's fake flowers tucked into one of the drawstring holes of his hoodie, fanning out over the fabric.  Simon smiles at him.

"Ready to go?"

Kieren's mouth bunches up to the side, but he nods.  Simon extends his cold hand, and Kieren steps up and takes it without a moment's hesitation.

…

They wait around at the bus stop for the bus to arrive before riding it to some town a half hour away that Kieren dimly remembers one of his classmates from year eleven moving from.  Simon doesn't tell him what's going on when he finally gathers the sense of mind to ask, emerging from the fog of the past week.

"'S a day trip," is all he'd offers, a quirk to the corner of his mouth.

The bus stops and they amble off, Kieren's feet hitting the grass of a park when he jumps off the last step of the bus doorway.  There're people milling about this way and that, a lot of them, actually, and Kieren watches as they walk from tree to tree, tables set up beneath the leaves.

He cocks an eyebrow at his boyfriend.

"It's an art gallery," he explains at last, gesturing to the yards upon yards of tables ahead of them.  "Bunch of local artists.  They come here every Wednesday and set up shop."

Kieren perks up at the news, and Simon watches as he bubbles to the brim with quiet excitement.  Kieren sticks out his hand and digs his fingers into the spaces between Simon's own before pulling him along.  Simon laughs, stumbling after him.

They spend the day ducking from tree to tree, Simon watching as Kieren takes in the paintings, his nose and mouth scrunching up when he comes across something he doesn't appreciate ("It's just a line drawn across the canvas with another line through it!" he'd hissed to Simon.  "It's not art - it's a graph assignment you throw in the trash.") and a content smile drifting across his face when he finds something that draws him in.

They stay there nearly all day, until the rain sets in and every one begins packing up.  Kieran and Simon help a couple artists run their things to their cars before they're running to catch the bus back to Roarton, hair damp and pressed to their skin, water droplets falling in rivulets down their faces and the backs of their hands, laughing as they fall into two empty seats.  An old woman glares at them from across the aisle and Kieren just makes a face at her, feeling too good for the first time in a week to give it up for anything or anybody.

The sun's setting when they make it back, and when Simon steps off the bus and takes a right, Kieren hops off after him and drags him off to the left.  When Simon cocks his head just so in question, a sad, wan smile tugs at Kieren's lips.

"I've gotta show you something, remember?"

Simon nods and lets Kieren drag him by the hand a few miles past the bus stop, disappearing in the woods the townsfolk avoided out of fear of rabid PDS sufferers.  They make it to a clearing in the trees and Simon finds himself face to face with a wall of rock, a dark hole set into the rock side.  The ghost of his stomach drops out of him at the sight of it, his mind working too fast for his own good.  A cave.  _The_ cave.

"Come on," Kieren murmurs, nodding at the cave with his head.  Simon follows him deaf, dumb, and blind, the icy state of his blood spreading phantom frostbite through his unfeeling limbs.

Kieren ducks inside the cave and Simon reluctantly follows, watching as a lighter flicks on in the darkness and Kieren meanders deep into the rock, his hand tracing the walls of rock around them reverently.  He comes to an abrupt stop and whirls around on Simon, his face a mess of lines and emotions.

"Close your eyes," he begs, and Simon does it without another word.  He feels the pressure of Kieren's hand grasping his and the movement of their bodies tumbling forward, and then suddenly their stopping a handful of yards later.

"Okay," Kieren breathes, and he manages to sound anxious and in an unbelievable state of peace all at the same time.

Simon opens his eyes.

Kieren's lit a few candles at their feet to illuminate the cave walls.  The first thing Simon notices is the bright paint splashed up against the rock, two murals brushed along the stone, one on either wall.  The one on his left is obviously, wonderfully, amazingly Amy, bright flowers tucked into her wild dark hair, clad in her long, frilly skirts, her devil-may-care boots, her vibrant red petticoat.  Her skin is pale as she loved it to be and her eyes are the muted lemon-lime yellow Simon found solace and purpose in, and suddenly he misses her desperately, wishes he could have done right by her, could have apologized for not telling her about Kieren so she could say, "It's okay, dumb-dumb.  You two were _made_ for each other" and make gross romantic faces at him.

His eyes fall to her painted boots and notice the frilly candles littered there, old wax running down the sides and onto the gravelly dirt cocktail of the floor of the cave.  There's a picture of her propped up against the mural, a real photo, and Simon feels himself choking, swallowing the mess in his throat.  He quickly casts his eyes to the other mural and finds relief in the solidarity, the unfamiliarity of it.

It's obvious who it is from the shape of his face and the outfit he's wearing - Simon had seen him wearing it in one of Kieren's old high school photographs yesterday.  Simon feels unexpectedly sad at the fact Kieren had drawn him as he'd been, not as how he was; Kieren had drawn the boy from high school he'd been in love with, who he'd kissed in caves and walked on eggshells with, not the resurrected boy who'd come back from the army with stitches keeping his face together and a knife forced into his hand from his father that had always been precariously pointed at Kieren.  Simon notices in the mural, though, that he has dog tags around his neck, and somehow that gets to him even more.

Simon gathers Kieren into a hug, his hands scrambling hard for purchase against his back, gripping him tightly.  He presses them together cheek to cheek, chest to chest, glad that they don't have a single heart between the two of them, because he knows in this moment it'd be bleeding out, raw and aching.

"Simon?" Kieren asks, his voice full of meek concern.  Simon presses his nose into the space just above his ear and breathes him in.

"You're incredible," he breathes.  "Just…fuck, you're beautiful, Kieren Walker.  You are, and I love you so fucking much and Amy and Rick did, too."

Kieren doesn't say anything, but his arms tighten around Simon.

They unravel from one another eventually, sliding down to the floor of the cave to sit amongst the dirt and candles.  They stay there the entire night, exchanging stories of those who'd left with spring when it rolled over into summer, Amy on this very day, Rick a week and a half ago.  It doesn't feel sad, though.  It feels warm and sluggish, like when a favorite song from years ago comes on the radio and you still know every word.

 

//

 

"What're you doing?"

Simon cracks one eye open to find Kieren peering at him, his head hanging over the side of the bed, caramel hair ruffled in every direction, a lost cause if there ever was one.

"Praying," Simon answers, letting his forehead fall forward to rest once again upon his steepled fingers, his thumbs pressed lightly against his chin.

"I didn't take you for the praying type."

Simon smiles but ignores him, trying to clear his head again.

"What are you praying for?"

Simon lifts his forehead and levels him with a look.  He's swung himself around on the bed and is watching him with his head in his hands.

"It's not like wish-making, okay, it's not like if you tell me it won't come true," Kieren snarks.  Simon just rolls his eyes.

"I'm praying for what I always pray for," Simon says, leaning forward to press a kiss to Kieren's exposed knee in closure of his prayer.  He clambers upwards and crawls into bed beside him, wrapping him up in his arms and gathering him up against his chest.  Kieren huffs at being manhandled but lets himself be moved about, sighing contentedly when his temple is pressed up against Simon's chest, his fingers spread out over his unbeating heart.

"Which is?" he asks, never one to let something go.  Simon doesn't mind though, eyes drifting up to the small, flat crucifix hung upon the wall above the bed and smiling.   _He probably thinks I was praying to you_ , he thinks to the figure looking down at them.  Above a bed is not the place for a crucifix, Simon decides.  He'll move it somewhere else tomorrow.

"You.  Me.  Eternity.  But mostly you," he admits, nonplussed.  A second of silence passes between them before Kieren is groaning.

"You're such a _sap_ ," he moans, but Simon can feel his unbridled grin pressed against him through the fabric of his t-shirt.  Simon just kisses his forehead, his fingers coming up to brush through his hair, and thinks _amen amen amen._

**Author's Note:**

> that was a, um, wide array of stuff. hopefully it wasn't /too/ crazy. i mean, zombie boyfriends, so i really don't even think there's really much of a crazy threshold in the first place, but hey. also, without a beta, so typos galore i am sorry


End file.
